Tips for Redesigning Your Website

Keeping up with the latest trends helps you engage users. If your site looks dated and 20 years old, it could potentially drive away users. To compound the problem, it could also affect your search engine rank. Most website owners redesign and update their site every few years. Here are some changes you should consider if your site is ready for a redesign.

Responsiveness

When mobile and data plans first came out, coders created separate sub-domains specific for mobile viewers. These separate sites were given the sub-domain name of "m," which gave them their name "em site."

Keeping two websites up-to-date is cumbersome, so designers came up with "responsive" websites. Responsive websites use HTML5 and CSS3 to dynamically rearrange elements on a page to fit smaller screens.

Today, you can take almost any design and turn it into a responsive website. You just need a developer to do it for you. You can still keep your current site code, but the designer will integrate responsiveness in your style sheets.

Minimal Menu Items with Drop-downs

Ten years ago, placing every option on the menu was the trend. Now, website designers are working towards a more minimalist layout. One such example is the use of fewer menu items. Within each menu item is a drop-down with other options. Previous designs were flat with several menu items and categories. Now, designers go with only three or four.

This doesn't mean you should eliminate menu items just to reduce the number of items you offer. It's important to create easy navigation for your users. Before you release new menu layouts, do some A/B testing to verify that it's useful for users.

No More Parallax Scrolling

Parallax scrolling is when you scroll down a page and the speed at which the page scrolls down or up changes based on the location of the page in the browser. It gives simple websites a little more depth.

The problem with this type of design is that it isn't always compatible with mobile, it's very non-intuitive, and it isn't too search engine friendly. For all of these reasons and more, designers have decided to get rid of this type of scrolling.

This design style is one of the few that has rolled back to standards prior to parallax scrolling release. Large, flat animations are still common, but designers have changed to standard scrolling or minimal menu items to direct users on what to do next.

Using Google Fonts Instead of Browser Fonts

It used to be that you could only display fonts that were installed on a user's machine. Now, you can use web fonts, specifically Google fonts. Introduced in 2010, it's a free font list that gives you dozens of styles to choose from. Since the fonts are stored in the cloud, they display on any browser. You no longer need to prompt the user to install the font.

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